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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25270834">what you built, it worked too well</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/gone_girl/pseuds/gone_girl'>gone_girl</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>the last great pirate king [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Black Sails</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Post-Canon, Treasure Island Compliant</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 08:01:26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,149</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25270834</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/gone_girl/pseuds/gone_girl</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>You built all of this. The resistance. But part of what you built, it worked too well. Long John Silver. All he had to do was open his mouth, say your name, and everyone listened.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>the last great pirate king [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1794574</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>28</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>what you built, it worked too well</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>To hear a story is not the same as passing it forward. To tell a story is not the same thing as creating it. To insinuate yourself into a story is not the same as controlling it.</p><p>Long John Silver, whose <em> Atlas </em> is said to appear on the horizon like a sea monster, hungrier for blood than for gold, beholden to no one. Fierce and snarling. Animal. This is not the story Billy told.</p><p>Princess Madi, whose navy rivals the British one, whose name is spoken with equal reverence and fear, bringing freedom but no mercy. This is not the story Billy told.</p><p>Captain Flint. Dead. This is not a story Billy believes.</p><p>The first time he hears it, he chokes on his drink. It would be comical, the way he sputters like a boy tasting rum for the first time, if it wasn’t so dismaying. The man accompanying him bursts out laughing and claps him on the back, too hard.</p><p>“Are you serious?” Billy asks, and the man’s grin slips slightly as he realizes Billy isn’t going to laugh with him.</p><p>“Deadly,” the man proclaims. “Long John Silver it was, snake of a king, stabbed his brother in the back.”</p><p>Billy opens his mouth to speak, and then closes it. Silver is, of course, capable of such a thing. But Billy doesn’t think Flint was a brother to him.</p><p>“Old bastard never cared a whit for a pirate republic,” the man says, shaking his head. “Way he carries on now… ain’t right. Kills as many pirates as he do redcoats.” Billy thinks about that. Wonders if he himself has killed as many pirates as redcoats. The thought makes shame and rage curdle in his stomach. He drinks.</p><p>For years, Billy keeps his head down. He works on ships, merchant and pirate alike, and wanders the Caribbean. He tells everyone who will hear him that Flint lives. Honestly, even he doesn’t know if this is true. As time passes, he begins to think that perhaps Long John Silver really did kill Captain Flint. Whatever the truth is, the man in the stories is not the same one who refused to kill Billy for the sake of a former friendship.</p><p>Whatever the truth is, Billy insists always that Flint lives. Some people disbelieve him, but others are happy to pass this gossip on, and Billy hears his own stories echoed, distorted, back at him as time marches on. Long John Silver, a brute rather than a king. Captain Flint, a drunken disgrace rather than a deposed tyrant. He listens to these stories without correcting them. That is a lesson Gates taught him, and Flint too, in his own way. He listens. He learns.</p><p>It’s as he’s working on a pirate ship- he’s a cook, and the irony makes him itch- that he hears talk about a buried treasure. The crew hasn’t had much in the way of profit lately, especially now that fencing stolen goods is harder than it’s ever been. In desperation, the captain has quietly launched a search for Captain Flint’s lost treasure.</p><p>“How are we to find that treasure?” someone shouts at the captain. “Long buried on an island no one can name, it is!"</p><p>“We’ll search out Flint,” the captain replies. “He’ll draw us a map if it’s the last thing he ever does.”</p><p>Not even a month later, a black spot is nailed to the captain’s door. In full view of the crew, the captain crumples the paper and tosses it into the roiling sea. He announces that they will be tracking down Flint and his treasure, without any attention paid to anonymous threats.</p><p>When they dock at Port Royal, Billy slips away and doesn’t return. And surely as the tides roll in, the captain is found dead, tied to his own mast.</p><p>And so something of a race begins in the New World. Flint’s fabled treasure exists, somewhere, and there is no pirate who would spill more blood to find it than Long John Silver. With grim satisfaction, Billy thinks of how frustrated Silver must be, to be so poor of a navigator that he cannot return to an island he’s been to before.</p><p>What a mockery of the name he’s made. A mockery of <em> Billy’s </em>name. It was Billy’s intention to live a quiet life, to make his daily bread and perhaps buy some land one day, but every time he hears the name Long John Silver tied to some fresh evil, he’s overcome with rage. And so he resolves to take this last victory from Silver.</p><p>It has been years, now, since the fall of Nassau. Blackbeard is dead. Captain Hornigold is disgraced. Calico Jack and Mary Read, both condemned and buried in unmarked graves on Jamaica Island. Anne Bonny is vanished. Long John Silver has gone mad. All the great pirate kings are gone, save one.</p><p>Princess Madi rules the Bahamas with an iron fist. Not the islands, of course, but the sea that they rest upon, and that is almost more important. It’s simple work to discover the routes she is most well-known to terrorize, and not much more difficult to find a job on such a route. And so Billy sails under the English flag for three long years, and when he sees Flint’s banner hoisted on four ships that trap the little merchant one he stands on, he smiles.</p><p>There is no fight. Nobody expected one. The weapons are confiscated, and Billy stands with the rest of his crew. They wait with bated breath, and they are not disappointed. Princess Madi in the flesh steps onto the deck.</p><p>She’s older. This fact almost surprises Billy, but, of course, he’s older too. She observes them with a stony gaze. There is a jagged scar on the left side of her face, still healing, and it makes her seem a monster come to life. Her eyes pass over Billy without a hint of recognition.</p><p>Her first mate drags the captain before the crew. He’s babbling with fear, even as he’s thrown in front of the Princess. Princess Madi draws her sword, and the captain, already pale and shaking with terror, throws his hands out before him pleadingly.</p><p>“No,” he begs. “Please, no, I surrendered. You can have-”</p><p>Princess Madi opens his throat, and whatever he had been about to say spills out with his blood onto the deck. Calm as anything, Princess Madi wipes her sword on his clothes and sheathes it.</p><p>“No more of you need die today,” she says. Her voice is harsh and low, but it’s steady, and betrays no emotion. “But to fly the English flag on my sea is a capital crime.”</p><p>Silver and Flint had always been prone to speeches. Billy assumed that the third of their little triumvirate would have this in common with them. But with barely two sentences, Princess Madi has the crew’s rapt attention. It doesn’t even feel strange when four other men, along with Billy, ask to join Princess Madi’s fleet.</p><p>Billy had begun to lose faith that he’d ever reach this step of the plan. Now that he has, he moves with renewed effort.</p><p>He never sees Princess Madi face to face again. Only the best of the men are permitted to sail directly under her, and Billy, as a nameless and unremarkable white man, is sailing on the eleventh ship of the fleet. But a network of gossip thrives, and even as far removed from Princess Madi as he is, he gathers the information he needs.</p><p>It’s not necessarily secret information. On the contrary, most of what Billy needs is common knowledge. It’s a simple matter of connecting dots. Pulling a story from what someone else might call thin air.</p><p>These are the facts. Several ships, on a rotating basis, make deliveries and trades in maroon and outlaw communities all over the Bahamas. Princess Madi’s ship occasionally accompanies these trading ships. There is a maroon community on the Florida coast. It is always Princess Madi’s ship which happens to be scheduled to make deliveries to this particular town.</p><p>It is little more than a guess, and so Billy waits longer, hoping for confirmation. Eventually, he gets it. Princess Madi retires from piracy and becomes Queen Madi. The moment she does, the same Florida community is removed from the trading schedule. Billy investigates, and finds that it’s a chore that Queen Madi performs on her own.</p><p>He continues serving in Queen Madi’s fleet, saving his share of profits. When he finally deserts, he carries no one and nothing with him except a pouch of money.</p><p>It takes him a long time to locate the maroon community, but when he finally reaches it, he’s caged, as he was all those years ago. The only words he will speak are a request to see Flint. And eventually, he does.</p><p>Flint’s hair is long now, longer than Billy’s ever seen it before. He wears it tied back in a neat but loose tail. He’s in a worn shirt and simple canvas pants. He sits before Billy relaxed, patient, and so unlike the captain Billy once knew that he can’t do much more than stare.</p><p>“I sincerely hope that you haven’t tracked me down just to gawp at me,” Flint says. It’s a gentle rebuke, carrying none of the ice that it might once have. </p><p>“I haven’t,” Billy says, but still, can barely think of much more to say. Flint does not press him again. Billy runs a hand through his own hair, which is, he realizes now, longer than Flint has ever seen it.</p><p>“I want to know where the treasure is,” Billy says at last. Flint, the bastard, actually laughs at that.</p><p>“Twice I killed you,” Flint marvels. “Twice I dropped you into the sea. Twice now you have returned to haunt me.” There’s a hint of the man he once knew, a mean edge to his mirth. But the grooves worn into Flint’s face are smile lines, and the calluses on his hands are that of a man who wields a spade, not a sword.</p><p>“I don’t care about being wealthy,” Billy says. “I swear I don’t. But a thing I created is searching for that treasure as we speak. I created it to bring you down, and that’s what it did. But it’s grown life that I never intended it to have.”</p><p>“Of course you didn’t,” Flint says coolly. “Long John Silver was not your creation.”</p><p>Billy blinks. “He-”</p><p>“He was mine,” Flint interrupts. “It may be your name, but the man himself… well.” Flint gives him a cold smile. “He claims to have unmade me. Whether or not that is true, I made him.”</p><p>Billy sneers. Even after all this time, Flint is still the arrogant bastard he’s always been. “He never would have been who he is now without me,” Billy says. “I confess I regret it whenever I hear stories of him. But I do not regret that he imprisoned you here.”</p><p>“Do you remember the man he was when he joined the crew?” Flint snaps. “You could have stuck any label you like to him. It would not have worked. I made him capable of all he did.” Flint falters, and drops Billy’s gaze. “All he does.”</p><p>It’s these last few words, spoken so softly they’re barely audible, that makes Billy’s anger dissolve. Years ago, Billy was begging Silver to destroy the evil myth of Captain Flint. How strange it is, the circularity of this story.</p><p>“Don’t you want revenge?” Billy asks. “Or- or something? Don’t you want to take something back?” It isn’t even a rhetorical question. How is it that Flint sits here, peaceful and smiling, as Billy wanders the ocean without a thing to tether him but old rage and simmering fear?</p><p>“No,” Flint says simply. “I have been where he is now, but I only had to suffer my title for a decade. Silver has nothing left to offer you. I think you should stop trying.”</p><p>Billy slumps back against the wooden bars of the cage. “I can’t,” he says. “I can’t. I feel that I- I set him loose on the world.”</p><p>“You did,” Flint says, and his voice actually sounds kind. “I know what your intentions were, but the world never cares for your intentions.”</p><p>“Will you give me a map?” Billy asks.</p><p>“Yes,” Flint says.</p><p>“Would you give him one? If he came and asked you for it?”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>Billy regards him for another moment. He presses a hand to his eyes. He’s thirsty, and a dull headache is starting to throb at his right temple. When he looks up at Flint again, he seems only to be a harmless old man. If Billy attacked him now, he might win.</p><p>Or maybe Flint would kill him again. Billy isn’t sure of anything anymore. He closes his eyes as Flint gets up and leaves. He doesn’t think of anything, and sleep comes to him quickly.</p><p>Flint returns the next day, holding a little leather container. Billy opens it to find a map, rolled up carefully inside. The front contains instructions to find Skeleton Island, and the back is a map of the island itself, an X marking the spot.</p><p>“How do you remember this?” Billy marvels. “Twenty goddamn years, Flint.”</p><p>Flint smiles, but doesn’t answer, just sits down on the hard ground. “One last thing,” Flint says. “Would you tell everyone I’m dead again? I rather enjoyed it.”</p><p>Billy can’t figure out if he’s supposed to laugh. He settles for an incredulous chuckle. “How would you like to die?”</p><p>Flint shrugs. “In Savannah, Georgia,” he says decisively. </p><p>Billy stares at him. Flint stares right back. He’s serious, Billy thinks hysterically. </p><p>“What would you like your last words to be?”</p><p>“Be creative,” Flint says, sighing theatrically.</p><p>“Every story needs some truth,” Billy says. “What’s yours?”</p><p>Flint laughs. “Fair enough,” he says. “McGraw. There’s your truth.”</p><p>Flint leaves Billy to talk his way out of imprisonment. Billy thinks (hopes) that Flint wouldn’t have bothered to give him the map if he didn’t think Billy was capable of getting out of this cage. He cites his years of service in Queen Madi’s fleet, and they let him go with warnings not to come back. He doesn’t intend to.</p><p>So Billy continues to wander. He finds himself in Georgia, and pretends to be drunk as he leans towards the bartender conspiratorially and says, “Did you hear Captain Flint’s died?”</p><p>And thus Captain Flint dies once more. It’s a much more ignoble death than the last one, although Billy thinks this one would make Flint laugh.</p><p>“His last words,” Billy says. “Darby McGraw, fetch aft the rum!”</p><p>The little leather holder seems to burn against his chest, where he’s tucked it safely away. He doesn’t know what to do with it. He truly doesn’t have much urge to go find it, and couldn’t without a crew anyway.</p><p>Eventually, he finds himself another job on a merchant ship. He doesn’t need the money- being Queen Madi’s pirate paid well- but he wants to keep track of the rumors. Sailors are gossips, and the story of Captain Flint’s most recent death spreads easily. For many, after twentysome years, Captain Flint is little more than a half forgotten nightmare, and so his death doesn’t bring relief, only a new story to tell gleefully over a pint.</p><p>“Wish that blasted Long John Silver’d drink hisself to death,” Billy’s companion mutters. It’s a late, boozy night, a night where older sailors tell stories about sirens and sea monsters and old pirate kings. Inevitably, names Billy would rather forget are brought up. </p><p>Tonight, though, he’s too drunk to mind. The rum is unusually good, smooth and sweet, and he’s enjoying listening to these distorted old stories.</p><p>“You’re damn close to drinking yourself to death, Simmons,” Billy says lazily, and Simmons scowls back halfheartedly.</p><p>“We’re lucky to be sailing these seas,” Abernathy says. Abernathy is a little older than Billy. His ears are pierced, although he no longer wears earrings, and he has a tattoo on his chest that is almost covered by his shirt. “Once was a ship flying an English flag couldn’t go four miles without being raided. You-” Abernathy raises his bottle at Simmons, swaying in his seat. “You are too damn young to remember. A goddamn scourge Long John Silver is, truly, but at least it’s only him left.”</p><p>“Not only him,” Billy murmurs, barely aware of what he’s saying. “Queen Madi, too.”</p><p>Simmons lets out a snort and throws an arm over his eyes, leaning back where he sits. “Now ain’t that something? Longest reigning pirate king, a woman?”</p><p>“Don’t surprise me,” Abernathy grunts. “Woman’s touch is a killing blow. Longest and last king any breathing pirate will ever see.”</p><p>“Thank God almighty,” Simmons mumbles. His grip on his bottle loosens, and he begins to snore.</p><p>Billy’s seriously thinking about following suit when Abernathy turns a piercing gaze on him. “You thank God for that?” he asks. “The end of pirates?”</p><p>“I fucking do,” Billy says, laughing a little. He doesn’t know if he’s telling the truth.</p><p>“Don’t surprise me that you don’t remember me,” Abernathy says, and Billy almost drops his bottle. Abernathy laughs. “I was one of Calico Jack’s men. Not no more.”</p><p>“They hanged Calico Jack,” Billy says stupidly. Abernathy stretches out his hand and flips his bottle, letting the last few sips splash against the damp floor of the mess. A tribute.</p><p>“They didn’t hang Billy Bones,” Abernathy says. “One of the only men what survived Skeleton Island.”</p><p>Billy laughs bitterly. He wonders if he should tell Abernathy exactly why he survived Skeleton Island.</p><p>“You knew Flint.” It’s not a question.</p><p>“Yeah.” He feels acutely the weight of the leather cylinder, pressed in an inside pocket.</p><p>Abernathy leans forward. “You know where the gold is?”</p><p>Billy lifts his eyes to Abernathy. “What’s it to you?” he asks tiredly. “You’re a new man. You work for the English crown.”</p><p>“I’d tell old George to suck my fat cock if I could,” Abernathy says fiercely. “I did, for years. But you know damn well the time for that is past. Now is the time to take what you can and run.”</p><p>Billy rubs his eyes. “You want to find the cache?” he asks. Cursed thing, plaguing him for decades.</p><p>“We deserve to take something back,” Abernathy insists. “That’s our fucking right, ain’t it? For all the shit these kings put us through?”</p><p>Maybe it is. Billy drinks from his bottle. He wonders if this is what he owes, as well as what Silver owes to him. It’s been so many years. His rage has burned out. These days, it’s hard to remember what he’s angry about.</p><p>The next time they dock, Abernathy begins reaching out among his old friends. Slowly but surely, they begin putting together a crew. He can’t deny an excitement, starting to burn in him again. It’s been a long time since a pirate trusted Billy Bones.</p><p>Then they have a crew, and he’s making arrangements to buy a ship, and at meetings they call him Captain. They compile each crew member’s investment into a small chest. It’s the fund they’ll need to commission the ship and supplies.</p><p>Everything is going exactly as it should, until Abernathy wakes one day to find a black spot at the foot of his bed.</p><p>The younger crew members can’t fathom why this should change anything, but Billy recognizes the fear in Abernathy’s expression. He designed that fear. </p><p>“Don’t fucking speak to anyone,” Billy snaps at the crew. “Not a soul outside this room should know about this endeavor. I’m delivering payment for the ship tomorrow, and we will be ready to sail next week. We’re changing our meeting spots, times, everything. Listen and understand me. This is not something we should test.”</p><p>After the meeting, Abernathy lingers, the black spot clutched in a sweaty hand.</p><p>“Captain,” Abernathy says lowly. “Is this real? I mean, what if it ain’t-”</p><p>“It’s him,” Billy says. He knows he sounds angry, but it’s all he can do to hide the ice cold terror that curls in his chest for the first time in years. “Trust me. I know.”</p><p>Outside, a man screams. Billy swears. Abernathy and Billy emerge from the backroom to the front of the tavern, but before they can go outside, the scream is cut short.</p><p>“He found us,” Billy says tightly.</p><p>“Long John Silver?” Abernathy says, disbelievingly. Of course, disbelievingly. Billy wants to scream at him. He’s not a fucking demon, or a bogeyman in a children’s story. He’s real, and he’s at the doorstep of this fucking tavern.</p><p>But he doesn’t get the chance to say any of that. The door bursts open, and Billy’s new crew- minus three- stumble back inside, splattered with blood. After them come four men brandishing swords. Silver isn’t among them, and Billy is ashamed at how relieved he is to realize that.</p><p>It doesn’t matter. Long John Silver’s men cut Billy’s crew down before his eyes, and he knows even as he kills all four of them that this isn’t the last of it.</p><p>Billy runs back to his lodgings. He gathers up the chest of the men’s investment- his money, now, that they’d entrusted to him as their Captain. Looking at it, setting his bloodstained hands on it, makes him want to vomit. He knows even as he goes out to the docks, looking over his shoulder the whole way there, that he doesn’t have the fire he used to. He is afraid. He is grieving. He can no longer find it in him to be furious.</p><p>The escape to England is almost easy. Alone in the cabin he rented, Billy takes out the map in its leather container, worn now from how long he’s been carrying it in his pocket. He tucks it into the chest and then closes it. God, how heavy this chest is now, with all that’s happened to fill it.</p><p>He finds himself an inn, and he uses the money in the chest to pay for his bed there. He knows it’s too much when the innkeeper’s son looks up at him with shining eyes and asks his name.</p><p>“Don’t you worry your little head on that,” Billy says, gruff. “Call me Captain, if you like.”</p><p>The innkeeper’s son’s eyes grow wide as coins. “Is you a sailor, sir? Captain?” he corrects himself quickly.</p><p>Billy grunts out a laugh and doesn’t answer. God, he needs a drink. But first, he takes fourpence from his pocket to pay the boy to play guard dog.</p><p>“You keep watch for a seafaring man on one leg,” he says.</p><p>There’s only one thing that calms the terror that roils him, and it’s the shitty drink that Hawkins sells. Billy buys himself a bottle and goes outside to sit at the cliff and watch the sea. Every time he sees an unfamiliar ship appear on the horizon, he wonders idly if this is it, and he’s been found at last.</p><p>It never is. Sometimes he wonders if he should stop paying the Hawkins boy, but he doesn’t. What a marvel it is, the shell of a pirate he is! Once, Billy Bones was a good man, a brother to all those under the black, courageous and loyal. Now he cowers behind the English flag, overcome with terror at a legend he first told. He is afraid. He is ashamed. And so he becomes loud and drunk and swaggering, pretending that he’s a real Captain, as if he isn’t spending dead men’s money to protect himself from his own crew’s murderer.</p><p>Billy thinks often of the creation of Long John Silver. He has always taken credit for it, but even years later, he cannot forget what Flint said. <em> He was not your creation. He was mine. </em>And it’s true, isn’t it, that Silver learned to be what he became at Flint’s bloody right hand?</p><p>He lies awake at night, pondering these things. He goes over it over and over, every moment of his life since he’d first set the words Long John Silver to paper, the months before. He wonders endlessly, obsessively. Who first formed Long John Silver from nothing? Was it Captain Flint’s cruelty? Billy Bones’ cajoling? A killing blow, perhaps, the woman’s touch of Queen Madi? </p><p>Of course, it doesn’t matter now.</p><p>Winter is setting in, a cold wind cutting through the thin walls of the Benbow Inn. Billy is drinking almost a bottle a day now. The Hawkins boy often tries to discourage it, or at least calm him down when he gets loud, but Billy won't have it.</p><p>It’s a day like any other that Black Dog arrives.</p><p>Billy is making his way out to the cliffs to watch the horizon, his hand wrapped around the neck of a half empty bottle, when he comes face to face with Black Dog. He doesn’t recognize him at first. It’s been decades since he saw the man, after all, but Black Dog still knows him. In a different life, a different world, they built a pirate resistance together.</p><p>“Billy Bones,” Black Dog spits. There is nothing but hatred and fury in his expression. Billy envies the energy he has even after so long. He often wishes he was still capable of vengefulness.</p><p>There is not much left to Billy Bones, but he has always been an excellent swordsman. So Black Dog does not kill him. As Billy watches his old friend flee, bleeding profusely, he feels tired. No, more than that, he feels numb. There is a clattering noise, and it feels like an immeasurably long time before he realizes that it was his cutlass falling to the floor.</p><p>His last thought before he blacks out is that, at the very least, he took this last victory.</p><p>The Hawkins boy is sitting at his bedside when Billy opens his eyes. It occurs to Billy, suddenly, that he and this boy are about as old as Gates and Billy when they met. He closes his eyes again as the boy speaks.</p><p>“Captain?” he asks tentatively. “Are you all right?”</p><p>“No he is not.” There’s a stranger on the other side of him, a doctor by the look of it. Billy turns his face into his pillow. He listens to the doctor tell him the stroke nearly killed him, that he needs to lay aside the bottle, that he needs to rest. The moment the doctor leaves, he tells the Hawkins boy to fetch him a drink.</p><p>Then he’s tired again, and he goes to sleep.</p><p>Billy came up with the name Black Dog, back when they were fighting for something. He was a big man, with a wolfish face and dark hair that he wore long and unkempt. Black dogs are bad luck, a ghost that haunts one who hasn’t died yet. Billy’s regrets are many, but chief among them are the stories he told recklessly. How shortsighted he was, oblivious to the fact that the moment they passed his lips, they would begin to breathe air, and then grow teeth.</p><p>It’s two days before Billy finds himself able to walk. He ambles around the Benbow Inn, fuggy and weak and a little drunk. He lowers himself heavily into a seat at the bar, tired out from his short walk. He’d like to go out, watch the sea as he usually does, but it’s out of the question today.</p><p>“How are you then, Captain?” the Hawkins boy says brightly, his head popping up from behind the bar. He pours Billy a drink, and Billy grunts in response.</p><p>“Who was that man what attacked you?” the boy asks. </p><p>He considers the question. He thinks that maybe saying <em> another story I lost control of </em> would sound a bit dramatic. “Old crewmate,” Billy finally says.</p><p>“Really?” the boy says curiously. “Looked right wicked.”</p><p>Billy snorts into his cup. “Not the wickedest man I ever called brother,” he says. He doesn’t know why he’s saying this now, after almost a year brushing the Hawkins boy away like an annoying fly. Maybe it’s Black Dog. A mere superstition, bothering him despite the fact that he made it up.</p><p>“Was you a pirate?” The way the boy says pirate, like it’s something magical, like he’s asking for a bedtime story. </p><p>“I was,” Billy says. “Ten years I sailed with Captain Flint.”</p><p>The Hawkins boy almost drops the glass he’s wiping. “Captain <em> Flint? </em>Really?” His excitement shows. “Is it true he once-”</p><p>“It’s all true,” Billy interrupts him. “Every story about him. Even the ones that aren’t true.”</p><p>Confusion furrows the boy’s brow, and Billy smiles mirthlessly. “Don’t think too hard on it.”</p><p>Day by day, Billy regains his strength. His hands are clumsy now, and sometimes don’t tighten when he tells them to. Sometimes, he’ll intend to stand up, to find that his legs have vanished and left him in a heap on the floor. He knows he’ll never be the same, and if someone held a sword to his throat, he wouldn’t be able to defend himself.</p><p>As it happens, he doesn’t need to. What finally kills him isn’t so soft as steel.</p><p>Pew arrives in the early evening. There’s a sprinkling, ice cold rain outside, and suddenly, all the drink in the world could not make Billy feel warm again. If he weren’t seated, he’d collapse, his traitorous knees suddenly weak.</p><p>“Billy Bones,” Pew calls from the door. He steps forward, a thin wooden cane stretched out before him. Billy realizes that the man can’t see, and now he has a choice. He can be a man and answer to his own name, or he can stay silent, let Pew fumble around and then leave.</p><p>“That’s you, Captain, ain’t it?” the Hawkins boy says, demonstrating a stunning inability to read the room. Pew’s face turns slowly towards Billy. It’s a hollow face, pale and evil, unseeing eyes dark in the low light. A ghost, haunting one who hasn’t died yet. He supposes there’s not much of a choice now. He gets gingerly to his feet.</p><p>“That’s me,” Billy says. “Years don’t seem to have treated you well, Pew.”</p><p>Pew doesn’t say anything. He makes his way forward, cane tapping against the floor, and holds out his other hand towards Billy. Billy takes the folded paper from Pew and opens it. Etched in the middle is a black spot.</p><p>Billy looks up, but the door has already slammed behind Pew. He stares down at the black spot, turning the paper slowly to see the note on the other side. His mouth opens wordlessly, tremblingly. He’s vaguely aware of a numbness in his clenched hands. The note is the last thing he ever sees.</p><p>
  <em> Billy Bones, </em>
</p><p>
  <em> I’ve got a long fucking memory. </em>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>its still fuck billy forever! follow me @piratemadi on t*mblr</p></blockquote></div></div>
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